


Knowing Isn't Enough

by Welfycat



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Community: angst_bingo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-31
Updated: 2011-03-31
Packaged: 2017-10-17 10:03:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/175652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Welfycat/pseuds/Welfycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reid can't help but be very aware of both what is happening around him and within his own mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knowing Isn't Enough

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Angst Bingo. Prompt: Self-harm  
> Content Notes: Remembering/descriptions past self-injurious behavior (may potentially be triggering), observation of scars caused by self-injurious behavior (attentive, descriptive, and slightly graphic), discussion of suicide, suicidal behavior/attempts and murder (of victims in a case, not canon characters), references to drug addiction.

Over the years, Reid had grown adept at assessing the moods on the jet and had mentally classified them into categories and subcategories. On the way to a case it rarely varied; somber determination, focus, and the occasional tinge of horror, anger or worry depending on the details of the case. By the time they were called in there was usually bodies on the ground or children missing, so there was rarely cause for overt optimism, but unless something in the initial information was causing serious conflicts with creating a preliminary profile, there was usually a sense of quiet confidence. They knew they were good at their jobs and it was likely they would be able to solve the case.

The mood on the flight back to Quantico was more varied, with dozens of variables from the case affecting each team member, and each team member in turn contributing to the overall atmosphere. Cases that involved children, with the exception of the very rare cases where they managed to retrieve the child while they were still alive and untouched, were typically the worst. After those, each member of the team would isolate themselves; Morgan with his headphones, Hotch with his paperwork, JJ either pretending to read or pretending to sleep. The rest of them would wait at the sidelines, occupying themselves while they waited for the others to return to equilibrium through whatever processing or compartmentalization they used. Cases that were particularly grisly or inventive, typically the cases that dragged on while the bodies kept showing up, were also difficult in their own way and typically led to either the same self-imposed isolation or to small but involved games of cards in an effort to distract themselves.

When one of the team was injured or had been taken captive, the rest of the team tended to hover discretely, or less than discretely depending on the person, nearby with icepacks and words of advice. The injured party, again depending on the team member in question, either accepted the attention and concern with reassurances and as much grace as possible, or frowned and glared until everyone backed off a little. On the cases where they caught the unsub in a reasonable amount of time with no further causalities, the flight tended to be more laid back. The team would interact casually, play a game or just chat, all of them comfortable without having to worry about their next case quite yet.

And then there were times like now, where everyone was a little tense and concerned and the adrenaline threat was not quite worn off yet as the plane lifted into the evening sky. It was late enough in the evening that they could have chosen to stay in Michigan for the night and fly home in the morning. But the possibility hadn't even been discussed and the whole team had packed up to go to the airport without even having to check with each other. Morgan had already claimed the lone seat by the bulkhead, his headphones already in place.

Reid had looked at the contents of Morgan's iPod once, curious what type of music his coworker listened to in order to distance himself from both his teammates and the cases. When he found a single track of white noise, set on continuous repeat, Reid decided that it was what he'd suspected to begin with: Morgan's large encompassing headphones were simply his way of asking to be left alone. It was like when Reid had glanced in passing at the file folder Hotch kept with him and found sheets of numbers that he couldn't find any pattern or meaning in. When Hotch was busy with a file, something they could all assume meant that he was working on something important, the team left him alone. Reid didn't think that these ruses were meant to be foolproof, especially to their team whose curiosity and sharp eyes meant that they all caught things that were supposed to stay hidden anyway, but they were just a signal; similar to hanging a 'do not disturb' sign on the door handle of a hotel room.

Glancing around the cabin of the jet, Reid wished that he had established a signal of some kind by now, before his team had known him well enough that they'd see through most of his attempts in an instant. Reading was out, even the odd paperback novels that JJ and Prentiss picked up in airports. He read quickly enough, and mostly non-fiction, that him sitting and staring at a page without moving would cause more concern than it would assuage. Sleeping was the other popular solitary activity on the plane, most of them getting a less than an ideal amount of sleep while working a case anyway. But Reid doubted he could actually feign sleep in a realistic manner for more than a few minutes before he'd shift, and his wide open eyes would be obvious enough to anyone who dared to look.

Apart from cases where someone on the team was injured or in mortal danger, these were the ones that Reid dreaded the most, with a few obvious exceptions. The ones where someone on the team wound up having some personal connection that tore them up inside, leaving everyone else to hover and wonder where the line was where they were no longer thinking clearly enough to be an asset to the case. This usually happened when the victims, or the unsub, was someone who one of the team identified with, either through background or the type of victim that the unsub was targeting. JJ and Prentiss had run into trouble a few times when the unsub favored women who had similar physical characteristics, and Hotch was likely to see his own child in place of any young boy who was missing or dead.

However, it was even worse when the person in question was him. He'd been as inconspicuous as possible about how much the case had bothered him, retreating behind statistics and information and cross-referencing and making a complete and detailed geographical profile. The rest of the team caught on quickly enough, not that he'd expected anything less, but they'd given him space.

Only Morgan had approached, on the fourth night they were in Lansing, talking around the topic carefully and offering his support. In a way, it had been helpful, though not in the way Morgan had intended it to be. The case revolved around an unsub who was a former group leader at a psychiatric outpatient program. Morgan, and the rest of the team, seemed to assume that Reid's difficulty sprung from being in contact with the mentally ill and psychiatric care facilities; they probably assumed that it was bringing up memories about his mother or about his childhood. Their conclusions weren't entirely inaccurate, they even held a grain of truth, but Reid wasn't about to inform them of that. They could believe whatever they liked, as long as none of them had any indication of the full truth.

The case had brought up feelings, desires that Reid had thought were long gone but were surprisingly similar to the Dilaudid cravings he'd experienced during withdrawal and occasionally after. He'd never made that connection before, something he kicked himself a little bit over because it was obvious in retrospect, but then he hadn't thought about it in over ten years either.

All of the murder victims had been in their late teens to mid-twenties, all of them with histories of self-injury and/or suicide attempts. It had taken the BAU days to wade through the connections between the victims in order to find the unsub, mostly because with seven victims, nine by the time they caught the unsub and left Lansing, the connections were varied and numerous. Several of the victims had hospitalizations that overlapped, even more shared drug rehabilitation programs and other similar resources. They also had a variety of case workers, social workers, CPS, DCFS, and other involved officials that had at one point been involved with the victims, as well as a handful of abusive parents and partners to rule out. It had been Garcia who found the link between all nine of the victims, an outpatient program that was a step between inpatient hospitalization and less intense interventions.

It hadn't really struck Reid in more than an academic way, even though he'd noted the scars and fresh wounds on the post-mortem pictures of the victims, until he'd been kneeling down next to victim number eight. She was a twenty-one year old woman, murdered in the bedroom of her apartment, her throat sliced open and her body left on the floor with her long hair tangled in the congealed blood. Reid had reached down with his gloved hand and turned over her arm so that the inside was exposed. Thin scars, each approximately an inch and a half in length, were carved neatly in sets of fours and fives, starting an inch away from her wrist and leading right up to the crook of her elbow. At her elbow, the scars started crosshatching across the previous scars, the ones three quarters of the way back to her wrist still fresh scabs. Reid had tucked her arm back against her body and stood up, leaving the bedroom and going to look through the rest of the apartment, ostensibly completing the victimology so that they could compare it to the other victims.

These scars connected with something in Reid in a way that none of the others had, and when he pulled out a desk drawer and found a small collection of razor blades, all neatly cleaned and lined up, with gauze and medical tape in the next compartment, he'd retreated to the hall as soon as he felt his fingers reaching for the blades without a conscious thought. The scars on the other victims were messy; no patterns, no planning, the cuts and burns with dissimilar depths and thickness. On the nightstand in another victim's house he'd found a pair of scissors, still bloody from the last time they'd cut. But this victim, her scars were like his. Maybe she'd made them with the same intent, the same desire fueling her actions.

Reid hadn't cut himself since just before he'd finished high school. He hadn't actively wanted to cut for at least twelve years. Yet seeing those scars and the blades that were so neatly laid out made his hands smooth over the fabric of his pants and the barely there scars on his own upper thighs that were visible to only those who knew to look for them. At the time, it had helped calm his mind, had let everything slow down for a moment and let him disconnect from everything around him. Of course, just as soon as he'd started doing it he'd researched it, reading as much as he could find and drawing his own conclusions when there proved to be a dearth of truly academic research. There was more in the last few years, the behavior having been linked to several disorders and becoming less of a hidden and stigmatized topic.

In the end, it had been Reid's attention to the self-harming behaviors and suicide attempts that had lead him to connect the outpatient group leader, who four months ago had discovered a patient just after she committed suicide, to the murders. Rossi had theorized that the unsub had decided that the people he murdered had 'failed' treatment, just like the patient who had committed suicide, and that murder was more acceptable to him than suicide. Finding the unsub from there had been a relatively simple matter, and though the stand-off had been tense and lasted longer than any of them were comfortable with, no one on the team had truly been in danger.

Instead, they had all clued in that the case bothered Reid and had been watching him with growing concern ever since. When Reid looked up from his rumination, noting that he'd pressed his palms down against his thighs without realizing it again, he caught the brief movements that meant he'd been the subject of the team's attention. He knew, theoretically at least, that he could tell them, that he could give a simple explanation as to why the victims and the case had struck a chord with him, how it connected to his past in more ways than just growing up with a parent who was mentally ill. They wouldn't judge him for it, they didn't judge him for his struggle with Dilaudid so it certainly wouldn't affect their opinion of him to know about the coping methods he used as a child. But, when he imagined trying to explain it to any of them, even just to Morgan who had been his confidant more times than Reid can count, all he can hear is his eleven year old self trying to describe how it makes everything still and calm, and all he can think of is how impossible that is to explain to someone who hasn't experienced the rush and the clarity.

Reid noticed that his hands had migrated back to his thighs and gave up, leaving them there. It was better to have the team think he was just sitting oddly than think he was developing some kind of nervous twitch. He thought of sitting like this what seemed like a lifetime ago; cross-legged on the bathroom floor with his hand clamped down over a folded piece of paper towel on this thigh while he waited for the bleeding to stop so it wouldn't soak into his clothes when he got dressed and walked back to his bedroom.

He stretched his legs out far in front of him, his feet resting across the aisle of the plane. The desire had been steadily fading since they'd wrapped up the case, he was no longer looking at sharp objects with a thoughtful longing as he had more than once while sitting in the local police station. He wasn't exactly looking forward to writing up his case report, something that usually didn't bother him because it gave him a chance to finish organizing his thoughts and memories surrounding any given case. But this time he just wanted to put the lid back on the box of memories in his mind and move onto the next case, hopefully something that required some kind of calculating or a deep information dig that he could dive into and become the human computer he was so often accused of being. His fingers drummed restlessly and Reid focused his gaze out the window, the sun setting rapidly as they flew east. The mood on the plane hadn't lost the taste of uncertain tension with the passage of time and miles, but Reid couldn't think of a way to lessen it that wasn't likely to make things worse.


End file.
